My friend is really into World of Warcraft and he convinced me to take a "scroll of resurrection" which gives you 7 days playtime for free.

He was going on about how its "new wow" and better and I should come tank for his leveling shaman. But when I ran the old dungeons with him all that had changed was it was really, really easy.

When I used to play you'd take each pull carefully and have a mage sheep one, etc, etc. Later on they introduced markers to make this easier. Now its just super easy and you can forget all that stuff and just run the whole thing in 1 pull.

So he tells me to tank bigger pulls. To hurry up. That we could be doing it faster and getting more done. He felt like he could accomplish more with his time. To him if he was leveling faster he was actually getting in MORE game time regardless of how much real time gameplay was had. If it takes 3 days /played to get to 90 and he did it in 1.5 he's actually played 3 days of game in only 1.5 days!

So, is he really enjoying the game? He can get a lot accomplished with his time and see the results. But from my perspective we were just doing hard work and not enjoying the game at all. Acting like gold farmers do, really.

He's got no interest in Dark Souls, either. His mind is stuck in work mode and learning something new is a waste of time that could be invested in efficiently repeating content for maximum gains. Grinding, pretty much.

So 1 hour in dark souls might give you a little knowledge and cost you all your XP (souls). 1 hour in wow will give you some accomplished quests, some nice XP bar you cant lose, a few gains in herbalism, some gold, some time to collect you auction money and rub your hands at the profits, etc, etc.

Hmmm… I don't know if I'd go that far, where gaming becomes so ultra goal-focused that it's almost a mechanical chore.

The problem for me is when I spend an hour and don't get past the difficult boss. Then, the next time I play, I remember that I'm stuck on that fight and say to myself "meh, I'm not spending another hour on that."

What I meant by 'accomplishing something' is that I like to have a good pace where the story is moving forward and there is the right balance of challenge and success. It gets boring if its too easy where you are breezing through the action, and boring if you are stuck on difficult battles that are preventing you from enjoying more of the game.

Using your WoW example - I actually played it for a long time, but didn't do a lot of group activity because I liked questing at a leisurely pace, and being able to stop at any time when real life needed my attention.

I'm not implying that Dark Souls needs to cater to my gaming style, I simply wanted to clarify why I feel the way I do.